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This book explores the development of Robert Lepage’s distinctive approach to stage direction in the early (1984–94) and middle (1995–2008) stages of his career, arguing that globalisation had a defining effect in shaping his aesthetic and professional trajectory. It combines examination of Lepage’s theatremaking techniques with discussion of his work’s effects on audiences, calling on Lepage’s own statements as well as existing scholarship and critical response. In addition to globalisation theory, the book draws on cinema studies, queer theory, and theories of affect and reception. As such, it offers an unprecedented conceptual framework, drawing together what has previously been a scattered field of research. Each of six chapters treats a particular aspect of globalisation, using this as a means to explore one or more of Lepage’s productions. These aspects include the relationship of the local (in Lepage’s case, his background in Québec) to the global; the place of individual experience within global late modernity; the effects of screen media on human perception; the particular affect of ‘feeling global’; the place of branding in contemporary creative systems; and the relationship of creative industries to neoliberal economies. Making theatre global: Robert Lepage’s original stage productions will be of interest to scholars of contemporary theatre, advanced-level undergraduates with an interest in the application of theoretical approaches to theatrical creation and reception, and arts lovers keen for new perspectives on one of the most talked-about theatre artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
implicit anti-format it carries within it to the extent that every aspect of a show that becomes potentially predictable is open for revision. In the teaser to ‘Pangs’, a development from outline to second draft sees a simple fight between Buffy and a vampire called Kit become something different. The stage direction has ‘A young, sweet-faced student-type, JAMIE’ (‘Pangs’ second draft) looking nervous and
one convention to the other; just as Antony foresees his body twisted to shapeless ‘baseness’ when he is ‘windowed’ and ‘penetrated’ by the spectators of Rome. 26 ‘The time of universal peace is near’, declares Shakespeare’s Octavius, in the Virgilianism of the Stuart court, giving a spatial stage-direction for this messianic epoch to be put on show: ‘the three-nooked world
, nor ‘any physic to recure the dead’. ‘ She runs lunatic ’, as the stage direction has it; talking to her female servant as if she were the child Horatio whom she’d promised ‘gowns and goodly things […] / […] a whistle and a whipstalk’; then imagining her soul on ‘silver wings’ mounted ‘unto the highest heavens’ where she sees Horatio ‘Back’d with a troop of fiery cherubins
Schoneveld to suggest that this was also the source of later adaptations of The Spanish Tragedy . 21 However, the introduction of the Painter scene in Van den Bergh’s 1621 adaptation of the play suggests a later version of the play, even though we cannot exactly pinpoint which. A similar hybridity appears in the 1638 Dutch version of The Spanish Tragedy regarding the following stage direction: ‘ Jeronimo
their entrails. 9 In the play, as Antonio addresses his father’s ‘mighty spirit’ (3.1.27), a voice unexpectedly replies. There is no original stage direction, but the ghost’s words make clear that a spectral figure rises from the sepulchre itself, tearing his wrappings as he does so: Thy pangs
be a new heavenly body or a new kind of man. 30 Stage directions are similarly uncertain: the quarto describes the human as ‘ Image ’ until she is given the power of speech, when the stage direction, ‘ Image speaks ’ (85.1) is immediately followed by a speech prefix combined with a stage direction: ‘ Pandora kneeling ’. 31 The
whom owned theatres – but the scene’s medical context legitimated its scatological content. The second stage direction is more startling. On-stage defecation would certainly have created a ‘dramatic stage effect’, to quote the text, and one wonders whether this direction was meant literally or metaphorically. How can a character enact severe diarrhoea? And what was actually shown on the stage? Although I have not found any accounts of this play by those who saw it, a note written by the author of Caquire, Vessaire – probably to be identified with a certain Bécombes
tears hath pitied’ (4.3.25–6). Hers is not a dynamic of riposte, but of rescue and restoration – ‘O dear father’, she says, ‘It is thy business that I go about’ (23–4). Yet this interpretation is variable, depending on the point of view. For Cornwall, Albany, Regan, Goneril and Edmond, Cordelia is at the head of a foreign and enemy ‘State apparatus’. Commenting on the stage direction ‘ Enter with drum
gret tempest, and Saule faulyth down of hys horse; þat done, Godhed spekyth in heuyn.35 Here the ‘feruent’, or the lux de coelo prescribed by the stage direction, is apiece with the call for ‘a clowd from heven’ to come down and ‘sett þe tempyl on afeyr’ in the Digby Magdalen (1561a). Grantley has argued that effects involving fire and light were not only the most spectacular, but also the most suitable for the portrayal of miracles.36 What is more, the association of fire and light with the revelation of divine truth may go some way to explain the priority of